real men, real life, real love

Rainbow Briefs released

November 2, 2013

My Young Adult short story collection, Rainbow Briefs, under my YA pen name, Kira Harp, is now available for download on Goodreads – click the “download ebook” button and All Romance ebooks. You can also get it for .99 (with royalties going to benefit The Trevor Project) on Amazon. There will soon be a print version from CreateSpace/Amazon, that will sell at cost. (About $5.77) And once Smashwords decides to like my file, it will be downloadable there and distributed through them to Barnes & Noble. I love a lot of things about Smashwords and what they offer for self-pub, except their formatter. (They don’t call it the meatgrinder for nothing.) I’m hoping to get that done soon – to get it on more free sites so teen readers can download without paying (so no problem if no credit card 🙂 Access to LGBT ebooks for teens can be limited if they have to ask Mom or Dad to pay for them.)

I hope people enjoy the collection. My lovely and tireless editor Sara Winters has even lined up a few reviews for the stories. It’s entirely her doing that this went from, “Maybe I should bundle up a few of the stories in a freebie book” to the organized collection with links and cover and all the details. It’s been such a nice feeling to have Sara, and all my beta readers, letting me know they enjoyed these enough to be worth the time and effort.

I do love this kind of writing – seeing a picture that stirs the imagination, and then having the freedom to write a piece of short fiction that runs with the idea, just for fun. (And I apologize in advance for “Change of Plans” which does read more like a first chapter of a novel. Oops. Maybe one day, I’ll write that one.) I continue to write stories for the Goodreads Young Adult LGBT Books group monthly. (In fact, for October we had two prompts, so I wrote two :)) I post them under Kaje Harper, but for release I want people to be able to know what kind of writing they’re going to get, hence the second pen name.

My Kira Harp stories contain some strong language, where it feels appropriate to the teen characters. There is potentially sex in the plot, although not on the page. These stories are more happy than angsty, since our group loves to vote for pictures of kissing and hugging, and because I like happy endings. I do try to give the characters a real voice, and something interesting to say. There are links and contact numbers in the back of the collection for helplines and resources for LGBT teens, both in the US and some international. These were taken from our group’s Helplines thread (and if you know of other good ones, I’d love to add them to our group.) If just one person finds that information and uses it when they need to, then the publication has been worthwhile. And if this collection entertains, amuses, or enlightens some readers, then that’s all I can ask as a writer. It’s been a fun project. Thanks, Sara!